Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis

Introduction Theorizing Transnational Feminist Praxis RICHA NAGAR AND AMANDA LOCK SWARR Arundhati Roy follows in the traditions of Nehru, Gandhi, and many others. She is . using her position as an artist to fi ght for those who do not have a voice and is prepared to suffer the consequences. These are qualities worthy of the highest praise. —Kevin Baker, quoted in The Guardian, Friday, March 8, 2002 The global left media celebrates Arundhati Roy as one of the most infl uen- tial Third World activists resisting U.S. empire. Such celebration, however, does not mean that Roy’s intellectual voice and her political analyses have emerged in isolation from the struggles of activist communities—particu- larly, the Narmada Bachao Andolan—where she has learned many political lessons and developed her analytical frameworks as a part of collectives and movements. In other words, the limelight bestowed on a single activist does not change the reality that all activism is collectively constituted. It is the community of struggle that turns an activist into a hero; the labor of the activist cannot be abstracted from the community. In much the same way, all academic production is necessarily collaborative, notwithstanding the individualized manner in which authorship is claimed and assigned and celebrity granted to academics as isolated knowledge producers. Undergraduate classrooms, graduate seminars, workshops, conferences, academic peer reviews, and fi eldwork-based knowledge production are all examples of the everyday collaborative spaces and tools through which academics create knowledges and learn to speak to various communities inside and outside of academia. These spaces are also excellent reminders of an inherent contradiction that exists in the U.S. academic establishment: the system relies on the rhetoric and vitality of intellectual communities, while at the same time privileging a structure of individual merits and rewards 1 © 2010 State University of New York Press, Albany 2 Richa Nagar and Amanda Lock Swarr that is premised on a denial and dismissal of the collaborative basis of all intellectual work produced within the institution. This general tendency in the U.S. academy is made more pronounced by a celebrity culture where an internalized need to present oneself as an individual academic star often translates into a drive to abstract and generalize, frequently in opposition to those who are seen as immersed in “grounded struggles.” The assumptions and fallacies of a model based on the notion of an individual knowledge producer in academia (feminist studies included) are useful starting points for an interrogation of three sets of dichotomies critical to rethinking the meanings and possibilities of feminist praxis: individually/collaboratively produced knowledges, academia/activism, and theory/method. Such interrogation can also serve as a meaningful entry point from which to consider the relationships between local and global as well as to revisit the politics of authenticity, translation, and mediation with an explicit aim of extending ongoing conversations about the meanings and possibilities of transnational feminist engagements. This volume is an initial step in what we see as our long-term collaborative journey with one another and with collaborators in other academic and nonacademic locations (e.g., Swarr and Nagar 2004; Nagar and Swarr 2004; Bullington and Swarr 2007; Sangtin Writers [and Nagar] 2006) to refl ect on the meanings and implications of these three dichotomies in relation to transnational feminist praxis. We note two phenomena that have been in mutual tension. On the one hand, growing interests in questions of globalization, neo-liberalism, and social justice have fuelled the emergence and growth of transnational feminisms in interdisciplinary feminist studies. On the other hand, ongoing debates since the 980s over questions of voice, authority, representation, and identity have often produced a gap between the efforts of feminists engaged in theorizing the complexities of knowledge production across borders and those concerned with imagining concrete ways to enact solidarities across nations, institutions, sociopolitical identifi ca- tions, and economic categories and materialities. We reconceptualize collaboration as an intellectual and political tool to bridge this gap, with possibilities that exceed its potential as a methodological intervention. We suggest that interweaving theories and practices of knowledge production through collaborative dialogues provides a way to radically rethink existing approaches to subalternity, voice, authorship, and representation. Although such concepts as transnational feminist studies are sometimes invoked as if a subfi eld with shared meanings and assumptions exists, we suggest that the two phenomena noted here have constituted transnational feminisms as a diverse and diffuse fi eld where hierarchies and © 2010 State University of New York Press, Albany Introduction 3 practices pertaining to knowledge production have been unevenly treated in theoretical interventions. We argue for a transnational feminist praxis that is critically aware of its own historical, geographical, and political locations, even as it is invested in alliances that are created and sustained through deeply dialogic and critically self-refl exive processes of knowledge production and dissemination. We actively resist celebrity/expert politics while recognizing the limits of this resistance. In this introduction, we fi rst consider key approaches to the transnational by interdisciplinary feminist scholars in U.S. and Canadian academia. Next, we discuss these inquiries into the transnational in relation to practices of knowledge production by examining the interstices of the three sets of dichotomies identifi ed: academic/activist, theory/method, and individual/ collaborative. Finally, we analyze two texts published in the 990s that have become canonical in transnational feminist studies to explore the manner and extent to which they address these concerns and to identify some critical points of engagement and departure that might broaden and deepen the imaginaries and practices associated with political dialogues and intellectual production across borders. These three points of inquiry allow us to grapple with the ways in which collaborative praxis is marginalized in dominant institutional spaces of the academy and to imagine how such praxis can become a rich source of methodological and theoretical interventions and agendas that can begin the process of identifying and re/claiming those spaces. In the last section, we situate our arguments in relation to the process, structure, and specifi c contributions that have come together in the making of this volume. The Transnational of Transnational Feminisms Generally speaking, the popularization and embracing of transnational feminisms as a discourse in feminist/women’s and gender studies has coincided with a commitment to address the asymmetries of the globalization process. Yet, it would be incorrect to suggest that the term transnational has the same salience in South Africa, India, Egypt, or Brazil as it does in U.S. and Cana- dian academic feminist studies. Similar to concepts of “women of color” feminisms (e.g. The Combahee River Collective 982), “third world” feminisms (e.g., Mohanty et al. 99), “multi-cultural” feminisms (e.g., Shohat 998),“international” feminisms (e.g., Enloe 990), and “global” feminisms (e.g., Morgan 984), transnational as a descriptor has emerged out of certain historical moments in the U.S. and Canadian academy. It is important to acknowledge, therefore, the ways in which the deployments of transnational © 2010 State University of New York Press, Albany 4 Richa Nagar and Amanda Lock Swarr feminisms continue, or depart from, the intellectual and political legacies of women of color/third world/multicultural/international/global feminisms. At the same time, however, it is critical to be aware of the limits engen- dered by the overuse of transnational. Indeed, as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan argue, the term transnational “has become so ubiquitous in cultural, literary and critical studies that much of its political valence seems to have become evacuated” (200: 664). This makes it necessary to consider briefl y the various deployments of the idea of the transnational and how they feed visions of feminist praxis and collaborative knowledge production. In a discussion of transnational sexuality studies, Grewal and Kaplan (200) specify at least fi ve kinds of foci where the term transnational has gained currency: (a) in theorizing migration as a transnational process; (b) to signal the demise or irrelevance of the nation-state in the current phase of globalization; (c) as a synonym for diasporic; (d) to designate a form of postcolonialism; and (e) as an alternative to the problematic of the global and the international, articulated primarily by Western or Euro-American second-wave feminists as well as by multinational corporations, for which “becoming global” marks an expansion into new markets. It is in this last sense that we are concerned with the idea of transnational feminisms in this chapter—as a conceptual framework that strives to liberate itself from the political and intellectual constraints of international feminisms and global feminisms. Whereas international feminisms are seen as rigidly adhering to nation-state borders and paying inadequate attention to forces of globalization, global feminisms

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